Saturday, September 30, 2006

Hello,i've developed several personal applications on Smalltalk Squeak, the latest project is SqueakGtk.Smalltalk Squeak is, in my opinion, the most important open source implementation of Smalltalk, therefore it got many libraries and community support.However, it's still unused and unspported: for example it's not included into Linux distributions. Personally because:

Of its history and license problems

It's an heavy application, more than 20mb for VM and image, without integration with the desktop due to Morphic graphics and the console, hence it's not a good choice for scripting

Users who come from Java, Python, Ruby don't feel good to work into an isolated world, such as Morphic, own version control system and, as said before, no integration with the existing tools

Smalltalk stayed in its own world because there's no friendly and supported implementation of it.GNU Smalltalk, on the other hand, gained many features that could bring it to be the most important and used Smalltalk version... here's why:

Being GNU software, it can be included into Linux distributions as well

It's pretty small but features full, the tarball is 4mb (plus image) and the image normally is about 5mb

It has a console interpreter, so it can be used as well as scripting language, being more friendly for new comers. This allows programmers to choice their own development environment, both external and builtin (BLOX).

Currently GNU Smalltalk, got the most useful libraries, such as Net stuff, Tk, Gtk, XML, Regex, and more, with a good interface from C to Smalltalk and viceversa.

I think helping this project grow (the project is active and never died) means giving Smalltalk a chance to get into developers world just like other languages, without being isolated like Smalltalk Squeak and other commercial versions.

Saturday, September 23, 2006

Hello,these days i've been a lot inactive since i'm going to have serious problems against my right eye. It has a "Ulcera corneale" (in Italian) which could get to or bad view either no view for that eye.

So, i hope i can restart my activities soon and, really, get my eye back as good as before.

Friday, September 08, 2006

Hello guys,these days i've been a lot inactive, especially in the Squeak community, which is working tough for the final 3.9 release... sounds good :)

For my 18th birthday, my family bought an amd64 then i'm trying to get out a LFS, starting from a REALLY old gentoo stage3 from which i borrowed useful bootscripts ;).Actually it's pretty usable, with Xfce4 running on. I hope i'll get an Ethernet modem working soon and setup everything to restart my Gtk+ and Squeak related "activities".